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Sunday, 26 August 2012

Earlier this week, Fraser's Motorcycles posted up on their Facebook page that they had a Spyder RS-S motorbike...or is that motortrike?.... on loan for their customers to come have a look at and test drive. We thought it was a cool looking machine and thought it'd be fun to drop everything and go do a spontaneous photoshoot right then and there...so we did! We being me and model James Artaius.

I couldn't go to Fraser's and not ride my bike, so I hopped on our Yamaha Majesty 400 and rode to Gloucester to pick up James. Then headed on over to Fraser's. I did contact them in advance to make sure it was OK. :-)

Side note: I recently passed my motorcycle test and we bought a Yamaha Majesty from Fraser's Motorcycles. Lovely bike, I love ridding it. Here's a photo of it:

Yamaha Majesty 400

Back to the Spyder and the impromptu photoshoot....

We got there sometime after 3pm, so it was the middle of the day. The weather report said rain and the clouds were heavy all day so I was quite surprised when we got there and the sun came out! You might think that was a good thing, but for me it wasn't. It ruined my plans for the shoot. Well not ruined, just made it more difficult.

The image I wanted to take, which I'd envisioned in my head, was the subject lit up and the background dark. I'd planned on setting up a couple flash guns to try and light up the subject leaving the background dark and moody. But with direct sunlight this isn't so easy to do, that and my second flash gun depends on infra-red light which it can't see in direct sunlight. So bugger. But I did have my radio triggers and could fire one flash gun with that. So I used one off camera flashgun on a light stand.

James was great, didn't have to give him much direction, he knows how to pose. So he had fun posing and I had fun snapping away. The photo at the top was my favourite from the day. My husband says it looks like a studio shot and at first he thought I'd taken it down to my studio. But it's not and I didn't. It was taken right there in the busy parking lot with bikes all around it. Including my bike stupidly parked right behind it. So there is quite a bit of photoshoping going on but nothing too extensive. Mainly because I don't have time to fluff around much with photos these days.

For the top photo the sun graciously went behind a cloud, flashgun on stand in front of the bike to camera right. The camera was a full framed Canon 5D MII with a Canon 24-70mm 2.8L lens. Camera settings were: Manual; 1/200th sec exposure at f13; ISO 100.

Here's the original RAW file right out of the camera along with images showing what I did in the RAW processing (developing stage) and what I did in Photoshop.

If I'd had more flash power I could have gotten the background even darker, so less photoshopping. I look forward to trying this again one day. I've been thinking about investing in some new kit, maybe that new kit will be more flash power. :-D

Here is another photo from the same shoot. This one doesn't have so much photoshopping done to it.

A big thank you to James for coming out to play with me and a really big thank you to the folks at Fraser's Motorcycles for letting us have a play at their shop. We might have to do this again soon. It was really fun!